What needs to be open sourced about Concorde? The principles are well known, its the economics that are the deal breaker. Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, Embraer and Bombardier could all produce a supersonic civil aircraft if they so wished - but it would have such a small market, it wouldn't make financial or business sense for them to do so.

Hence the definition of a "failed" project. Open Source it so the everyman can study it and break it appart reuse any pieces they find interesting. It's not just so someone can use it in business it's about knowledge sharing and general interest and possible unforseen resuses of technologies.

That's taking a rather narrow view of what benefits can result from open-source. If they open sourced the whole design, who's to say what aspect of the design someone might learn something useful from in doing some other project. I'm quite certain there are parts of the design where engineers solved a particular problem in a way which could be applicable or instructive to any number of other engineers, not just aircraft engineers working on a supersonic civil aircraft. The value of open source isn't mere

All crypto products should obviously be open source, that'd cover many VPN solutions. Wuala should be open source for the same reason.

All crypto should be open source, but for different reasons. Schneier wrote on this a bit; unfortunately, I don't have the links at hand, but here are some quotes:

As a cryptography and computer security expert, I have never understood the current fuss about the open source software movement. In the cryptography world, we consider open source necessary for good security; we ha

There have been several different models since their introduction on May 11, 1999 although AIBO was discontinued in 2006.
*snip*
On January 26, 2006 Sony announced that it would discontinue AIBO and several other products as of March, 2006 in Sony’s effort to make the company more profitable.

to deal with all the sacred cows the company had accumulated over the years.

So Sony is the corporate equivalent of a Mooby's? Wait... actually, that kinda makes sense.

But no, the reason he was hired was to be a distraction, really. Sony's real business model has always been to try to take over [kotaku.com] the standard so that everyone has to license from them.

Consider the following list:Beta vs VHS -> Sony collected royalties for over two decades on Beta in the form of Betacam recording and the professional TV industry (where image quality did in fact matter more).

DAT vs standard audiotape vs CD Audio -> DAT was actually very popular in Europe and Asia for a good while. Licensing restrictions and "piracy worries" kept it mostly out of the US thanks to the MafiAA.

Minidisc vs CD Audio -> See DAT. Minidisc eventually came back for another, even more stupid round as the "UMD" they were pushing in the PSP.

ATRAC audio vs MP3 audio -> The reason nobody in their right mind would ever buy a Sony portable music player as compared to, say, a Nomad or iPod.

Sony MemoryStick vs SD Memory Sticks -> Sony keeps pushing out their own proprietary lines of gear. PSP and a host of cameras keep this line alive and it sells, despite being way overpriced compared to the SD Micro format.

Think about it. Why did the PS2 have a DVD drive? Sony was part of the DVD consortium. Why did the PS3 have a Blu-Ray drive? Same reason. Before the PS3 launched, HD-DVD was actually winning the format war despite Sony USA refusing to put out any of their movie catalog in the format.

That's the Sony business model. Try to win a "format war" in a way that everyone has to pay you royalties to license your format. Everything else is ancillary at best.

Beta vs VHS -> Sony collected royalties for over two decades on Beta in the form of Betacam recording and the professional TV industry (where image quality did in fact matter more).

The only thing Betacam and Betamax have in common is the physical tape cassette. Betacam ran at ~6x the speed of Betamax and used a different recording format to achieve much higher quality.

DAT vs standard audiotape vs CD Audio -> DAT was actually very popular in Europe and Asia for a good while. Licensing restrictions and "piracy worries" kept it mostly out of the US thanks to the MafiAA.

DAT was popular in the professional audio industry as it was the first relatively affordable digital recording medium. Still, the technology used meant it was much more expensive initially than the analogue cassettes it replaced. The digital copy protection imposed by the *AA was an issue in Europe as much as the USA. La

You forget the moment in 2008 when Sony paid Warner Brothers a metric shit-ton of cash to go Blu-Ray Exclusive.

I don't forget that at all. Doesn't change the fact that when Warner was releasing both formats that the Blu-Ray was consistently outselling the HD DVD version by wide magins. And by early 2007 [slashdot.org] Blu-Ray was already outselling HD DVD. There are a multitude of other stories from early 2007 through mid 2007 showing the same thing long before Warner went exclusive. By mid 2007 Blu-Ray was selling 2:1 over HD DVD.

Before that moment, HD-DVD was outselling Blu-Ray. It was really that simple.

Not going to happen for two reasons:
- More often than not, technology or techniques developed from said projects are used in future or ongoing projects.
- Only one thing worse than your project failing is releasing it in the wild and having another company or group making it successful without you.

I'll give you number 4:-The company that released the product likely did not invent every piece of technology in it. Especially with the kind of hardware in this list, at least some parts or patents on some parts were licensed from a 3rd party.

If we really cared, we could probably get this list to 20, guy who wrote this article is dreaming.

No it's not. Daytime dreaming costs our economy billions, even trillions of dollars every year! What society needs is a brainwave analyzer and a dream counter, so dreams can be taxed and lost productivity converted to money, to be funneled back to the economy through the usual channels.

What society needs is a brainwave analyzer and a dream counter, so dreams can be taxed and lost productivity converted to money

No, it's much worse than that. While you are daydreaming you are not consuming entertainment. Daydreaming is worse than piracy, because pirates at least may work as advertisement, an honest consumer may end up buying the product he sees at his pirate friend's house.

Daydreaming should be outlawed, along with singing, whistling, or humming songs.

Uhh, I'm afraid that you are dreaming, more than anyone else here. How 'bout a guick list of the comanies most likely to form such a consortium, who actually have the money to do forced hostile takeovers? I think the wealthiest company that is freindly to open source is IBM, but they have their own ideas on open source. Then, there's Oracle, with their Open Office and Java - oh, wait. Not really that freindly, right? Going down the list - well, there's Red Hat. Wonder how large a company they could ea

This and also : patented technologies used that might leave a company liable and similarly licensed technology used that cannot be open sourced. They're asking companies to take a product they are about to kill and spend a lot of money on it to go through the code weeding out anything that might expose them to lawsuits. In exchange for what, exactly ? It might be a boon to customers using legacy products but you want those using your new products, there's zero upside for companies on this.

I read the title differently from its intended meaning. I thought it meant that if there is a project that you want to die for sure, then open source it and everyone will sit around waiting for someone else to work on it. I suspect there are some examples of that happening also.

Not going to happen for two reasons:
- More often than not, technology or techniques developed from said projects are used in future or ongoing projects.
- Only one thing worse than your project failing is releasing it in the wild and having another company or group making it successful without you.

Another reason - liability. If something goes wrong with a project they developed and then open sourced, they may find themselves the target of a lawsuit since they will have the deep pockets.

Exactly. PalmOS is probably still being used in some industrial, military, or medical device some where. It works and they see no reason to develop and debug a new one.There is also liability issues. For all a company may know there might be a Stupid software patent they didn't know about that they used in their code. Of course on the plus side there could be prior art in their code as well.A lot of the rest of the stuff just didn't make a lot of sense to me like Open sourcing the Flip? Get a CMOS camera se

Good point or good question. The fact is, there are multiple licenses, and it has often been pointed out that the BSD licenses are most freindly to people who wish to commercialize their code. It often seems that people forget that little fact, instead ass-uming that "open source" has to comply with one or more GPL licenses, which is less freindly to commercialization.

Open Sound Systems is another that has open sourced their code, but at the same time, maintain development on a commercial product. In fac

All products would most likely need an audit which would take both time and money...to avoid any legal trouble that could happen. Something I doubt either company would do for the sake of giving people free shit. But you never know, maybe they have higher moral fiber than I think:)

These companies don't want to compete against their own products (released to open source). They'd rather make these products disappear forever, and force customers to buy the newest gadgets.

Basically it's the same strategy Microsoft follows when it refuses to open source Windows 3 or 95 or XP.

Exactly. Companies don't want the public to improve their old products, preventing them from buying new ones. For example, let's say Cicso opened up the software of all of their old routers. The open source community would take those routers and improve on them, giving them features only available in new routers. Now companies will upgrade their old routers instead of buying new ones.

Also, there is a liability issue. In the example above, what if someone found a security hole by examining the software

The company doesn't necessarily own all the rights to all the components. My dad and I wrote a BASIC interpreter for the PC in the 80s, but when we decided we wanted to release the source, we realised that Walter Bright owned the code that we had licensed to do the floating point arithmetic.

If anyone wants to take on an MS-DOS BBC BASIC interpreter written in assembly, and fancies writing a new module to do floating point to replace the code in question, let me know and I'll talk to my dad about it again.

Actually it might not be too bad. Just change the calls to 8087 calls and say that you must have an FPU. The problem comes down how well the code is documented. Of course part of me is thinking just how freaking fast this would be. Using freedos on modern PC running this everything would probably fit in the L1 cache! Egads.

If IBM was to open source OS/2, not only would Microsoft be all over them (it was, remember, a joint development effort), but they'd probably be in violation of the agreement with eComStation which allows that company to modify and continue selling the thing.

Actually it's equivalent to X with a big chunk of GNOME thrown in. IMHO, in some respects it's still way ahead of X and GNOME, in other respects it's maybe only a few years behind.

Open sourcing OS/2 is not very likely since Microsoft holds a number of the patents on the kernel and HPFS file system which I don't blame them for holding on to since some are likely included in the current release of Windows. However, I may be wrong, but I think only IBM holds the patents for the WPS. There was even a WPS for

I've personally used it for several projects with great success... they really did a nice job on it and you can even use Visual Studio to develop for it, which makes it incredibly easy to debug as well. (Attached debugger to the hardware, for example.

Even though something is "failed or discontinued", that doesn't mean that there are a lot of patents based on it. Open sourcing some of these would probably raise the wrath of the legal departments. So I guess a lot of companies would rather decide to just sit on the stuff, instead of opening some other can of legal worms . . .

Really dumb. The whole IBM cheated conspiracy theory came from GMs who saw one move and thought, "wow that didn't look like a computer-y move at all!" Well guess what, modern chess computers would find that sort of move easily, and the old idea of what a computer-y move looks like has been dead for a decade just in the software chess comps.

Another thing people fail to realize is that Deep Blue was a hardware research project. IBM doesn't sell chess computers or software, and never had any interest in it. An

The reason these companies will never open-source even their 'failures' is because the greed is so consuming that they will squat on the IP of even the failed projects hoping to some day milk some extra cash from it.

Case in point: the 1990s DOS game Ascendancy. It was developed by a tiny outfit named The Logic Factory; not at all Big Corporate Business even. Its source has never been released. A sequel was promised for over a decade (Duke Nukem Forever, anyone?), though it never materialized. The game e

I actually have no problem with this. They dusted off their IP and are using it again. If they were to leave it to languish and still sent out the C&D letters, then you would have a point of it being pointless.

The reason a lot of these things will never be open sourced is simply because the technology is still economically viable, and will be used for other things, even if the PRODUCT involved isn't. The AIBOs and Deep Blues of the world aren't the "endgame", they're a way of getting the tires on a given technology to be kicked for a bit.

Bringing back dead projects mostly create software zombies, the ghosts of the old project might come back to scare you (IPs, bugs, patents, people..). It is always better to start again and build from ground up a better product, even if you need to reinvent the wheel here and there, but that is mostly for the better anyway.

Allow me to introduce you to the elephant in the corner that is owned by IBM - OS/2 Warp. Remember that? You know, the 32bit GUI OS that ran windows applications faster and more securely than the version of windows that was available at the same time?

I think I just came across another ATM recently that was running a specialized version of Warp; so I guess we can't call it completely dead yet, even though IBM won't sell it for any amount of money.

So if a software product is killed off, and the code made available for everyone (not just the good guys) to inspect, who pays the cost of patching any security vulnerabilities that are found as a result?

It's not that the holes weren't there before (you never know, they may *be* the reason the product got canned), just that until it was handed to the world on a plate, there were easier vulnerbilities in other products to exploit. I have to sa

There are a lot plus a lot of good projects that don't get enough help.For instance Firebird and PostgreSQL are both really good database projects. MySQL gets the most attention and is available on more web hosts so most projects make that the prime Database with often PostgreSQL as an after thought.http://www.firebirdsql.org/ [firebirdsql.org] isn't dead but is almost invisible.And then you have Lazarus + Freepascal which offers a very Dephi like system. It runs on Linux, Windows, and OS/X and there is a lot of cool code wr

Unfortunately, it can take a fair amount of work to properly open source a large commercial project. The commercial project may well have bits of code and other assets from various sources under various restrictive licenses and either permission would need to be obtained (which makes work for the legal department) or documentation for the restricted code would need to be written so that somebody in the company or a volunteer could do a clean-room rewrite.
And even if there is in fact no such code or asset in the project, I assume due diligence would require someone at the company to go through the project carefully to make sure that they have the right to release all of it. Plus, even after all that was done, there may be issues with required proprietary build tools--though that issue could be left for the community to work around (one can release a tarball that doesn't compile and let someone try to figure it out)--and, as many people mentioned, there may be issues with patents.
Last year, I tracked down and persuaded the author of the now defunct but excellent PalmOS astronomy app 2sky to release it under the GPL. But open sourcing it wasn't easy, even though this was a much smaller project than some of the ones mentioned. There were a large number of chunks of code to be rewritten because the author had obtained them under a GPL-incompatible license. And for me to be able to generate binaries and debug, I had to switch it to an open source toolchain from Codewarrior. And finally I had to reverse-engineer some of the author's database formats because he couldn't track down the documentation for them and the data needed to be updated (new daylight-savings rules, new comet data). It all works now (open2sky.sf.net [sf.net]), but it was more work than I expected.
The point is that to open source a large project is more work than inserting GPL notices and tarring. A company needs to make sure that everything they can't open source has been removed, and they may feel reasonably hesitant about releasing an obsolete project that doesn't successfully build. I still wish they would release.:-)

As the software curator at the Computer History Museum, the compromise that works most often is releasingcode for non-commercial use. From a software preservation standpoint, it does put it in an institutionalenvironment where the code can be saved and studied in the future. The most recent agreement is with PARCreleasing the code for the Xerox Alto.

Companies are in the business of making money. If they can't make money from it, no one else can have it.

Case in point MAME. MAME lets you play old arcade games (along with old console games). Some of the games haven't been available for decades and still companies like ATARI go after websites providing MAME downloads. Why? Because they have a HUGE stick up their @ss about someone else using their property.

Companies exist to make money, what's the business case for open sourcing your failed products? Quite apart from all the other issues with proprietary pieces of technology that you might still be using, the fact that you might yourself resurrect a project if the market for it changes, and the fact you'd rather you competitors keep guessing about exactly how advanced you are.

Quite literally, the code for some games is sitting forgotten in a drawer somewhere, "property" that will never - ever - be exploited. It's too old to be of any use whatsoever for commercial products, while there is a niche of old-time gamers who would love to port/rewrite/develop it for opensource use. But no, someone "owns" it, and can't give up the idea of squeezing that long-dried-out teat for a few more drops of wealth.

When IBM killed OS/2 there was tremendous pressure for the company to open source the operating system. At the time, the vast majority of the banking industry ATM machines ran on OS/2. After doing some analysis IBM concluded they simply could not open source the operating system. Not because they didn't want to but because of all the 3rd party licensed technology embedded in the system that IBM did not own. Without agreements from these 3rd parties IBM concluded it was not a legal option for them to publish the source code. Even today there is pressure on IBM to open source OS/2. Conversely, one could also concluded the company has no upside to open sourcing. It would take a tremendous amount of legal and technical experience, time, and money to get all the agreements in place to put such a system in the open source domain. I would argue this would be a great treasure for researchers as well as computer scientists as well as corporate customers but IBM has different ideas. Likewise, other complex systems also are bound to many different patent and 3rd party agreements as well as internal propensity to keep secrets in house.
http://www.os2world.com/content/view/16595/1/ [os2world.com]

If you don't want to pay for one of the "gloves" that Moryath described, you can download packages off the internet (some of which are free) that, if used correctly, are said to cause a layer of insulating hair to grow on your Palm. Hwever, you may want to do this at home to avoid awkward conversations with supervisors. WARNING - If your screen starts to fade to black, stop immediately.

I have an SGI Octane II that I still use occasionally. I would love to have the Irix source, as I'm sure a lot of people who have these things around would. I'm not sure what's stopping them, though I guess it could be something to do with patents on Unix.

The price of a good condition Edsel is probably much higher than that of the new vehicle. I'd guess that, for those who collect these, having access to design and maintenance data on their vehicle is quite desirable (even though reverse engineering mechanical parts is pretty simple compared to s/w).

Surely no company is stupid enough to allow 'technical leads' to make such decisions without management being made fully aware of the consequences through a review by legal.

So no, you can't 'force' companies to release something as open source like that. Either management is aware of the consequences (which means you didn't force them), or you did stuff without management approval and are at risk of being sued yourself.